Make no mistake: Christian art offers a distinctive gift to the world
He that is weary, let him sit.
My soul would stir
And trade in courtesies and wit
Quitting the fur . . .
—George Herbert, “Employment”
While working my first editorial job, my editor-in-chief revealed to me one of the great secrets of our trade: Most people can’t tell the difference between a clear statement and a true one. When something is confidently stated, even if it is manifestly wrong, it carries a certain weight of truth. This is the danger of saying something like There’s no such thing as Christian art. People will tend to believe it. From there, things will get worse: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, for example, or Art is whatever you can get away with. Before long, you can’t objectively explain why Michelangelo’s David has anything more going for it than a banana taped to a wall.
In college I helped host a well-known Christian songwriter (who would later publicly deconvert with a maximum of “cringe”) for a local concert. He, with great disdain, tried to make this point too. “There’s no such thing as Christian music,” I remember him sneering. “What—does the little Christian song ask Jesus into its little Christian heart?” It made sense when I was nineteen. Now he sounds to me like an insecure man trying to separate himself from something he disdained. It was spoken from ignorance, not knowledge.
Of course there is such a thing as Christian art. It represents the greatest single cultural contribution to humanity in history. It is that expansive and overwhelming tradition that has arisen over the past two thousand years as the result of Christian worldviews and the cultures shaped by them. It is so large in scale (and we in the West are so close to it) that it is understandable if we take it for granted or miscalculate where it starts or ends. But it is neither reasonable nor entirely forgivable that we should have to debate whether it exists.
By way of getting quickly to my point, consider “Islamic art.” No one seems to debate whether it exists, and rightly so. Islamic art is a remarkable and easily recognizable tradition. No other culture in history (except perhaps the Celtic Christians) so mastered the decorative possibilities of geometric patterns, or the potential of certain forms of ornate and expressive calligraphy. But of course the Islamic art tradition is not just “art made by Muslims.” It exists as the clear product of a worldview. It is a shared belief, made manifest. The representation of the human and other living forms is expressly banned in religious settings, and is generally discouraged by the tenets of Islam. In response, the creative spirit in cultures dominated by Islam has found other outlets for expression, and has climbed to great heights with them. This artistic tradition is Islamic in a manner quite separable from the beliefs of any individual artist or viewer associated with it. It is inherently Islamic. It exists because of that worldview. It is for it. It is of it. There is, to anyone not playing games with words, obviously such a thing as “Islamic art.” Why would “Christian art” be any different?
That said, I can see where such a question comes from. What is commonly called “Christian” art today has been mislabeled. This is because of the “Christian” music and publishing industries that arose beginning in the late 1960s (ironically, right as the last major Catholic and Christian literary renaissance in this country was fading). “Christian” became a consumer category; a glorified barcode. It arose to meet consumer desire. In a quickly changing culture and retail market, certain segments of people wanted products that were culturally non-threatening. My wife worked briefly in Christian radio promotions in the early 2000s, and the tagline of her radio station (“104.1 The . . . Fish!”) sums up the perspective: “Safe for the whole family!” In the short term, this sort of declawing of the arts to appeal to the underdeveloped comfort zones of (largely evangelical) churchgoers has hurt us. People are right to want something better. But we must be clear: This is to be rejected not because this sort of thing is Christian but because it is not Christian enough.
Christian art is art that has been definitively and directly shaped by the Christian worldview. The richness of the resulting artistic tradition is unequalled in history. This is directly attributable to a Christian understanding of the universe and the unique, divinely ordered place of the human being in that universe. Christian art includes vastly diverse disciplines, movements, periods, and specific traditions whose forms and subjects are intimately tied to the cultures that have arisen from the beliefs of Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christianity. They are not dependent on the personal faith or faithfulness of the artist or the audience. They do not need to be explicitly spiritual at all. But their foundation is essentially and irreplaceably Christian.
This foundation, expressed in an expansive diversity of voice and form, is a single core worldview which has been a uniquely fertile creative soil. Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts and the pater familias of our contemporary American literary renaissance in Catholic and Christian circles, took steps to define this worldview in his 2013 essay “The Catholic Writer Today.” (This essay is essential reading to anyone interested in the topic of Christian literature in our time.) He lists (the precise phrasing is mine) human struggle in a fallen world, the sacramental sacredness of nature, the redemptive quality of suffering, and a sense of continuity between the living and the dead as key to this worldview. In these, I believe he is fundamentally correct—and with minor caveats, these are true of all Christian writing, far beyond the Roman Catholic. To them I would add one point of expansion: the tremendous Christian appreciation of the profound value of the individual person as the locus of the image of God.
This worldview, so intimately connected to the great story of the Christian faith, is unique in history. It does not hold the essential quality of personal fatalism that is the core of Classical narratives, nor of the impassivity that Eastern philosophies tend to inject into the art and story of their cultures. It has a great regard for overlooked things and people and considers no subject to be too high or too low for the attention of the artist. One can find God in a potato by Van Gogh. Do you think that this perspective is common in the history of human culture? We elevate the beauty of the “low,” the possibility of change and redemption, the goodness of common grace. These are belief statements, and they are, with few exceptions, unique to our tradition.
This worldview is uniquely adaptable to any artistic medium. It acts like fertilizer for the creative mind. Where it is believed, art flourishes. It can inhabit architecture or a novel with the same intimate expansiveness. Artists from Bach to Buechner, from El Greco to Graham Greene, have found themselves kneeling at its clear and overflowing well, though in very different manners, and with very different results. In this artistic tradition, as in our faith, nothing and no one sits below our sacred attention, for they are held (like even the smallest seed or sparrow) in the gaze and love of God. Nothing and no one are beyond redemption, for “all things” will, in the end, be caught up in Christ. There is no sin and no righteousness that does not hold the potential for a worthy subject. The bawdiest joke and the highest and most sincere expression of sentiment have their place. The unfortunate masturbation habits of Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces are as fair game as Dante’s Empyrean vision in Paradiso. Rabelais’ Pantagruel belongs as much as Vodolazkin’s Laurus. The Christian artist, like any Christian, is absolutely free. And the Christian artist, like any Christian, is absolutely bound by that freedom.
Christian art has the effect of telling the truth about people—that we are a sacred, disastrous mix-up of the divine and the debauched; that we are, through overwhelming grace, beloved candidates for unreasonable redemptions; and that all things, everywhere, are fitting objects of deep and sustained attention. Christian art assumes the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness, is able to describe why they are as well as what they are, and is able to partner with them to intentionally connect the soul to the “upward” draw of the divine eros, which seeks eternal satisfaction in the life of God. It humanizes both artist and audience, increases their ability to know and love the good, and becomes a way for us to participate in what St. Paul calls “the divine nature.”
Merely by sketching this, we can begin to see what is at stake when we lose our ability to see the rich tradition of Christian art. Besides a confusing parochialism (assuming that the values or products of the culture that birthed us are some sort of given in human history, which they are not), we simply stop being able to know what makes art good. “Good” is a value statement. “Good” implies belief. “Good art” is a worldview claim. When we sever the relationship of belief and art we make ourselves the most pitiable sort of Esau—trading a blessed inheritance for pottage. We’re not abandoned to trying to reinvent the artistic wheel with a Moleskine notebook in a third-wave coffee shop. We can learn what makes Beauty beautiful, and how to partner with it.
Our tradition, and its trustworthy connection to transcendental reality as experienced in real art and beauty, can lift us from our circular logic and despair into that higher experience every writer and every artist yearns to achieve. Without it, all that we have are the oppressive subjectivities of taste and popularity. It is either I like it so it is good, or They like it so it is good. Is that really the limit of what may be said about the beautiful? I hope not. I do not trust myself enough for that, and I certainly do not trust all of you.
Christian art and literature welcome us into a complex but consistent tradition, one that is able to tell us the why and how and who of beauty. The artist then becomes responsible for the what and where and when. It becomes our work to give this “a local habitation and a name,” to quote Shakespeare. This is not abstract philosophy—it is the most practical thing in the world for anyone who is drawn to the creative arts. There is language for you. You do not need to reinvent every wheel. You can get on with your work, your contribution to the tradition. You can be confident that even if every step is a struggle, it can be a struggle in a promising direction, on a path that has been walked before. It feels like the difference between swimming with the current of a strong river, and swimming against it. Some kinds of easy are bad. This is not one of those kinds.
Let us narrow the field a bit to my own area of expertise: Christian writing. As an editor, a significant portion of my work is to help writers extract their gaze from their own navels. The only way to reliably do this is to help them see writing as an act of love, centered beyond the self and meant as gift. It is not coincidental that the uncurling process this demands of a person looks precisely like the shape of Christian sanctification. St Augustine’s image of sin as being incurvatus in se—curved in on ourselves—makes for bad writing as well as bad living. Christian art, when consistent with the metaphysics of our worldview and our weatherbeaten wisdom on how to live those out, shows myriad paths to an uncurling. It allows us to enter a world whose dimensions are larger than the contours of our own selves. This expansion will not by itself make us holy , but it sure helps. This is a glorious reality, infinitely above parochial accusations of Christian art as “didactic” or “propaganda.” If we are able to sneer at it, perhaps that is because we have not truly seen it yet.
The Great Tradition of Christianity can tell us what makes beauty so beautiful, and what makes the truth so true, and what makes goodness so good. It can do so without resorting to a single platitude or cliché. It can show us how our lives may climb up the very universe like a vine climbs a trellis. It can shrink the continents, to make time null. It is able to pass dreams and songs and tales across the very veil of death, and give them to us not as a cold or distant artifact but as a generous inheritance. This is not to say that Christian art has any sort of corner on the market of human truth, goodness, and beauty, but it is to say that the tradition provides an incomparable architecture to know and inhabit them—and to do so in the glorious company of other people.
This tradition is both objective and deeply personal. It is larger than us, but it belongs to us, and we can belong to it. This is incredibly energizing to the creative mind. Good writing requires form and craft. Good writing involves technique, and the mastery of the principles of your chosen genre. Good writing requires more than novel arrangements of words. It demands an encounter with truth.
Through all of these things, we learn how to enter this life larger than our own, to stretch, to be pulled one more rung up the ladder of creation, into the glorious and rowdy communion of the saints and the surprisingly rough and earthy presence of God.
Christian art is a living tradition. There is an ebb and a flow to its health over the centuries. While fragile and at an ebb today compared to several centuries ago, there are encouraging signs for its rich resurgence on every front. The cutting edge of the Western arts is returning to a strong emphasis on form and on objective mastery of technique. Exciting new things are happening in every area of practice, from abstract and representational painting to sculpture to architecture to choral composition, to dance, drama, and every domain of literature.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but today’s outstanding Christian writers include Jon Fosse (a Roman Catholic convert, and the 2023 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature), Marilynne Robinson (winner, among many other honors, of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), the late Geoffrey Hill, Christian Wiman, Ron Hansen, Susannah Clarke, Eugene Vodolazkin, Leif Enger, David Bentley Hart, Bret Lott, and more than a few who might squirm under the label yet are sincerely pursuing their work within an arguably Christian metaphysic and worldview— A.E. Stallings, George Saunders, Carl Phillips, and Byung-Chul Han, among others. These are writers who are not only completely impossible to imagine without the rich nourishment of a Christian worldview but whose work is clearly and sincerely of and for that tradition (even if personal religious convictions may vary). They are, each in their way, following Ezra Pound’s injunction to the writer to “make it new.” They are concerned with exaltation and debasement, judgment and redemption, light and darkness, wrath and grace, the sacred and the profane.
In the past decade we have made significant strides in the literary landscape of American Christianity (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant). Paul Elie’s 2012 The New York Times piece “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” seems out of touch today. That piece, which prompted Dana Gioia’s rejoinder “The Catholic Writer Today,” can be indirectly seen as sparking the initiation of the (excellent for all denominations) Catholic Imagination Conference, the founding of a deliciously radical Master of Fine Arts program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, the beginning of new literary presses including Wiseblood Books, Slant Books, and new key imprints at Word on Fire, influencing exciting new outlets such as Ekstasis, now supported by Christianity Today, shaping a host of journals (Dappled Things, Presence, The Windhover, and many more), and vitally encouraging a noticeable “bloom” of generational-quality talent, whose true powers and best work I expect we are yet to see. This development is, in my personal and professional opinion, poised to expand explosively in the coming years, as an exhausted and jaded culture seeks something larger, more patient, more generous, and more beautiful than anything it is able to create.
I would like to go on record predicting that in future decades, the 2020s and ‘30s will be seen as a miniature golden age of Christian literature, comparable to that of the early twentieth-century flourishing of Christian writing in Europe (Eliot, Auden, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Jacques Maritain, Mauriac, George Bernanos, Evelyn Waugh) or the mid/late century Literary Renaissance in America (Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, J.F. Powers, Yvor Winters, Dorothy Day, Robert Penn Warren, and many more). I expect these names from our present moment will include Dana Gioia, Marly Youmans, Joshua Hren, James Matthew Wilson, Sally Thomas, Malcolm Guite, Makoto Fujimura, Jonathan Geltner, A.G. Mojtabai, Jane Scharl, Ryan Wilson, Katy Carl, Seth Wieck, Morgan Meis, Brigid Pasulka, and many others. They are working in fiction, drama, poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction. I think Hren’s term Contemplative Realism describes the rough aesthetic outline of this little movement, though it is still in its early days. Regardless of who or what is remembered from our time (this is the least important part of any of it) my point is simple—exceptional talent is everywhere, and growing, in and because of this living tradition.
In a conversation last year with my dear friend John Wilson (former editor of the legendary and now-shuttered Books & Culture), he was noting the growing richness of what is happening right now in Christian writing. “This wasn’t happening twenty years ago,” he said to me. “Not like this. There was talent, but the talent wasn’t together.” I believe he is right.
And here we come to the invitation and excitement of the thing: We need each other. We need our tradition. We need you. We have a beautiful, once-in-a-generation opportunity to lean with the wind, to steer into the current, and to see just how far we may go together. There are books to be written. There are books to be read. Every one of us has a role to play in creating a vibrant ecosystem of Christian art that is able to preserve with joy the great work of the past, while adding new works, works of our time and place, to it.
When we see the goodness of Christian art and writing, we are free to participate in it with a new depth of joy, sincerity, and connection. I can see myself and St. Augustine working on the same project from different angles. I can delight in that work, in the eternal freshness of certain questions and dispositions of the soul. In that spirit, I can set aside my own cramped smallness and breathe. Loneliness and artistic claustrophobia are trounced by a higher calling than our own appetites. We, as the psalmist says, have a “goodly inheritance.” We are invited to build and give and play with its riches. In this work we become better able to know and love the world as it is and as Christ intends to redeem it. We become better able to know ourselves, suspended as we are between those two realities.
In this, Christian art plays a double game. Because whatever else it may be doing, true beauty is also nourishing the very root of the soul. It is calling and drawing us to God. In encountering the great works of beauty, and in participating honestly and directly in the creative process, we may also find ourselves encountering Beauty himself. To gaze on him is life, and light to the whole of our being. What we find in entering a larger tradition than ourselves is ourselves.
I have seen for myself the goodness, potency, and clarity of this tradition for the artist and the writer. What would it mean for our creative minds to fully reclaim it? What would it mean for our culture? It would mean renewal, honest and real and good, at every level of human contemplation and conversation. What would it mean? What it has always meant—great thought, great feeling. Great architecture. Great painting, sculpture, music, dance. And yes, great writing—true literature. A tradition able and worthy to be inhabited by those who both receive it and make it as a gift. A world more beautiful, more true, and more good.
This is good faith. It also makes for very good art. And believe it or not, this is not in spite of Christianity.
It is because of it.
Paul J. Pastor is Executive Editor for HarperCollins’ Nelson Books, Contributing Editor for Ekstasis, and author of several books, including the forthcoming The Locust Years: Poems (Wiseblood Books, 2025). He lives in Oregon.